Blog Tour Stop : The Next Breath by Laurel Osterkamp

Summary (from Goodreads)

Title : The Next Breath
Author : Laurel Osterkamp
Publication Date : August 11th 2014
Publisher : PMI Books
Goodreads - Amazon 

I kiss him, choosing love over honesty, which is a choice nobody should ever have to make…"

Robin loves sweet, responsible Nick, with his penchant for Beethoven and Ben Folds Five. But she also still loves her college boyfriend Jed, an irreverent playwright plagued with cystic fibrosis. Now Robin is struggling to reveal her secrets and confront her past, as she finally performs in the play that Jed wrote for her, eleven years ago. Will Robin have the strength to keep her promise and stay true to her heart?

Alternating between present-day scenes, college flashbacks, and segments from Jed’s play, this tear-jerking yet uplifting tale illustrates how life is finite but love is infinite, and the road to recovery begins with the next breath.

Guest Post 

Why Cystic Fibrosis?

I knew very little about cystic fibrosis before I started writing The Next Breath and I don’t personally know anyone who has it. So why did I decide to write about it? Well, I wanted to put my main character, Robin, in the situation of loving someone whom she felt destined to lose. I thought it would be a good back story for her, and it would explain why present-day Robin is at once so wise and stunted.

Whatever illness her college boyfriend was going to have, I knew I’d have to do a lot of research to get it right. But I have two children and I can be an alarmist when it comes to their well-being. For instance, if I started researching leukemia, pretty soon I would convince myself that my children were going to contract it. So I picked cystic fibrosis, which is hereditary. Children are either born with it or not, and researching something like that, rather than cancer, would save me a lot of nightmares.

But the more I read about cystic fibrosis, the more I realized how important it was to depict this illness realistically. People don’t die suddenly from it and there so much that patients need to do on a daily basis, like airway clearance and taking lots of medication. Their digestive systems suffer along with their lungs, and children with CF are often in and out of the hospital for weeks at a time. And when it comes to lung transplants, well, they’re the most risky type of transplant, and getting one brings on a host of all-new considerations, so CF patients really need to think hard before making that decision.

I was amazed at the generosity of so many people with CF, who share their stories online. That is where I got a lot of my research: from reading the CF blogs. The young woman who blew it out of the water was Eva Markvoort, who ran the blog, 65redroses.com. The blog still exists, but sadly, Eva died in 2010. She chronicled everything, and her brave video “goodbye” to all her readers is heartbreaking. She was suffering from chronic rejection three years after her lung transplant, and she had been told that she wouldn’t recover. But she was an amazing woman: loving, strong, and an incredible writer. There is also a documentary about her, which streams on Netflix, called 65 Red Roses. (Parents often teach their children to say “cystic fibrosis” by telling them to say “65 Roses,” hence the title. Eva added in “red” because it was her favorite color.)

Parts of The Next Breath that were really challenging to write were Jed’s hospital scenes. I wanted someone who suffers from CF to be able to read it and say, “Yeah, that’s realistic.” I also wanted someone who loves someone with CF to be able to say, “Yeah, that’s how Catherine and Robin would act.”

In the end, cystic fibrosis is only one part of The Next Breath. My aim was to write a story about loss and recovery, strength of spirit, and the power of love. I hope that’s what I did, but in the process I learned so much about what true bravery and strength really are. And I learned that even still, there’s so much that I don’t know.

Author Biography

Laurel Osterkamp becomes very attached to her characters, and it’s hard for her to stop writing about them. The Holdout, November Surprise, Blue State, Campaign Promises, American Angst and The Next Breath all feature the Bricker family, as their stories continue. (But you can read any of these books in any order.) You can find Laurel on Twitter but she needs to work on sending clever Tweets. A better idea is to follow her blog at www.laurelosterkamp.blogspot.com. Laurel teaches in Minneapolis, MN, where she tries to stay warm, spend time with her two nearly perfect children and husband, and find the time to write. Her other novels are Following My Toes and Starring in the Movie of My Life. Visit her at www.laurelosterkamp.com.

Giveaway

$25 Amazon Gift Card (INT)
Ends December 3rd, 2014

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Be sure to check out the other tour stops here.

Thank you to Candace at CBB Book Promotions for letting me be part of this tour.